Baobab Trees-Tree of Life

It is official, I have not spoken to one child in my village who received a Christmas gift!!!  And it is not because they were too poor, naughty or that the reindeer missed the location on google map. It is just that they keep to the fact that it was the day Jesus was born, they all went to church to celebrate his birth and had the day off.  Period, final, that is it! Amazing isn’t it. The bigger cities are a little different, there was more commercialism and probably more gift giving as well. New Years was more of a celebration than Christmas.

 
I decided to spend some of my Christmas vacation to see a bit of Madagascar that the travel books boast about. I live in the middle of the country, in the highlands and the west and east coast are very different, as well as the extreme north and south of the island. Some areas, like the south coast, we are prohibited from visiting because the roads are too dangerous. They are full of bandits, yes bandits. The police are posted along the way to stop single cars traveling alone. They hold them up until 5 or six cars arrive and have them travel in caravans. The bandits will not try to stop 5 or more cars to rob.

 

The west coast boasts the renowned Baobab tress that is a must see. We left the highlands, full of rice fields at 7:00 am with a very nice hired driver and arrived 10 hours later in Morandava. It was 10 hours of harsh, windy roads. The driver failed to tell us his air conditioning did not work and as soon as we drove over the last of the highlands the weather became brutally hot and sultry. The scenery changed slowly, the green rice fields gently disappeared and became dry dessert areas. The houses changed from the red clay/brick to bamboo/mud and thatched roofs. The oxen and cattle vanished and there were hundreds of goat herders rambling about.

Morandava is a lazy seaside town where all the women and many men dress in traditional lambas. It is too hot to wear much else. The women also smudge their faces with a brown clay type substance which comes from a tree bark to protect it from the sun.

This area is home to the Sakalava tribes and the people here have a different dialect. Madagascar is made up of many different tribes. Much like our old west with different Indian tribes. In 1800’s the chief of one of the largest tribes wished for Madagascar to be one nation. Today, with the help of the British and French they are one, but the various regions still boast different dialects and traditions.

The Sakalava have the most African influence in language, dress and customs. They are the darkest skinned people of Madagascar. They are fishermen, not farmers. It was breathtaking to see hundreds of carved out boats with hand crafted sails depart early in the morning for fishing. In the evening I would walk to the edge of the lagoon to watch the fisher men come back in and take out their catch of the day to clean and sell. Lots of grouper, and barracuda.

They also worship their dead relatives with a more fiercely passion than in the highlands. Fascinating were the tombs of the Sakalava tribes throughout the trip. The Sakalava are famous for erotic paintings on the outside of the tombs of their deceased relatives, which depict things they can do when they are dead, but which are considered fady (taboo)when alive. Some were a bit shocking!

We stayed at a hotel right on the Mozambique channel. It is owned and run by an American in his 60’s who ran a white-water rafting business in Colorado years ago. In his youth he guided groups of the “extreme sports” types to the most exotic and dangerous white-water rafting in the world. While traveling through Madagascar, he fell in love with the place and when he had an opportunity to buy the hotel he grabbed it.

We woke at 4:30 am and departed so we could see the baobab tress at sunrise. It was a 45 minute bumpy drive on unpaved roads from the hotel. The trees were a stunning sight, some of them almost a thousand years old. The trees are tall, as short as between 16 feet and as tall as 98 feet. As wide as 23 to 36 feet around. Legend has it that the baobabs boasted so much to the other tress in the region that they were the tallest and best, that God uprooted them and stuck them upside down in the sandy ground. The knurled branches at top do look like roots. Walking under them one feels unimportant and insignificant. The tree drops a small brown fruit which looks similar to a coconut covered in a short nappy fuzz, like brown velvet. The white sticky fruit is not edible, but if boiled with sugar it becomes a powerful medicinal drink, guaranteed to cure any affliction.

We did not see any small “baby” baobab trees sprouting about and when I spoke to an agronomist later he said that the large land tortoises, who use to be abundant in the area were becoming extinct as people ate them. It is the tortoise that eats and digest the baobab fruit and the seed begins to ferment in the juices of his stomach, later he deposits that seed in the sandy area and that begins the new baobab tree. Without the tortoises to begin the process there is a lack of new trees. I learned that the Missouri Botanical Gardens, from St. Louis has a research lab here in Madagascar, I hope they are discovering man made ways to reproduce the baobab tree.

We also took the opportunity to visit a nearby lemur reserve, only 50 kilometers but a 2 ½ hour grueling drive. We saw two more types of lemurs in this area in trees. The reserve sports the smallest lemur that looks a bit like a mouse, but they are nocturnal and unfortunately, we did not see any. Madagascar is a unique interesting place in the world, but traveling about is very difficult, expensive and tiring, not for the faint hearted.

Mask and sunset at hotel.

Typical house and family pounding a green leaf they eat